Well, it’s the last Wednesday of the month, and I hope you know what that means: it’s time for your regularly scheduled MAME release. There aren’t a huge number of new working machines in this release, but there are some significant improvements. Thanks to kazblox, MAME now emulates some of the peculiarities of Famicom clone hardware, and thanks to shattered, emulation of the Agat-7 Apple II clone is improved. Peter Ferrie provided a superior Apple II language card implementation. We’ve got lots of additions to the BBC and PC software lists from Nigel Barnes and darkstar.

We’ve made substantial improvements to some of MAME’s non-emulation features. The -romident verb is now much faster when used on a folder or archive containing multiple files, and will identify ROMs for emulated slot devices that aren’t inserted by default. The -listxml output now includes all linked devices, and is produced at least 30% faster. We’ve also improved -verifyroms so it covers more devices and is faster when verifying ROMs for a subset of drivers/devices.

MAME 0.184 includes support for plenty of newly dumped versions of supported arcade games, including a rare US prototype of Shanghai III, the world release of Super Crowns Golf, a version of Flashgirl that shows the Kyugo logo, a German version of Raiden II, the Japanese release of Radical Radial, and bootlegs of Bomber Man and Phoenix. There are also several new chess computers, and even more Aristocrat Mark V gambler sets. If you’re interested in the TI-8x graphing calculators, it’s now possible to get an emulated TI-82 or TI-85 to communicate with another emulated instance or with a program running on the host computer over a socket.